The truth that the hedonist obscurely foresees is that every spiritual activity is constantly accompanied by the practical reflex of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, pleasure and pain, value and dis-value. Value is every activity that unfolds itself freely, dis-value is the contrasted, hindered, impeded unfolding of the same activity. If we call beauty the æsthetic value, then beauty is but the successful expression, or better, the expression, since an unsuccessful expression is not an expression at all. And it is not necessary to repeat that by expression we distinctly mean not the physical stimulus, but the spiritual synthesis.
With this definition of æsthetic value we reach one of the most important points of Croce's thought: the solution of what he calls the dualism of values, or ideals, to the concrete realities. As the beautiful expression is simply expression, the true thought is simply thought, and so on, so the ugly expression or the false thought are non-expression and non-thought, the non-being which has no reality outside the moment of its opposition and criticism.
[IV. TECHNIQUE AND CRITICISM]
Art and technique—Errors deriving from the common conception of technique—The theories of the particular arts—The literary genres —The rhetorical categories—The categories of language—Genius and taste—The æsthetic judgment—The idolatry of standards—The æsthetic standard: the true objectivity—Criticism and history.
The relation between the æsthetic activity and the practical moment of the production of the physical objects of art may be regarded under the aspect of the relation between art and technique. The only legitimate meaning of the word technique is that of a body of naturalistic knowledge in the service of the practical activity of the artist. In this sense we can conceive of a great artist who is a poor technician, as in the case of a painter who should use Colours subject to rapid change and deterioration, a musician who should be a bad singer or pianist, a poet who should not be able to recite his own poetry. But in the common language of critics, we mean by technique something quite different—in painting what we call drawing or composition, in music, harmony or orchestration, in poetry, metre and construction. Now it is quite clear that we cannot conceive of a great painter who could not draw, a great musician unable to harmonize or to orchestrate, a great poet whose lines are defective. What we here isolate as the technical handling of an artistic subject is but the process of æsthetic creation itself, the succession and progression of intuitions in the artist's mind; using the naturalistic or psychological method, we abstract certain moments of the creative process, and we attribute a reality to such abstractions. We talk of the technique of a poem or of a painting as being something that has been superadded to the original intuition; we see the poet or the artist engaged in learning the technique of his art; we see him correcting or modifying his original expression according to certain technical standards. But what we call the technique of a poem or of a painting is that particular poem or painting in its concreteness; and no poet or artist can learn a technique except by re-creating in his own spirit the work of the great masters, his technical education being but one with his æsthetic education; and finally, the process of correction or modification is merely a stage of the expressive process itself: no poet can correct a line in his poem, no painter change a line or a shade in his picture, if the internal image has not first spontaneously undergone such corrections and changes in his mind.
The consequences of the common conception of technique in criticism are more dangerous, because more subtle and affecting a more intimate knowledge of art, than those of any other æsthetic error. The talk of the connoisseur and of the average musical or dramatic critic is full of such fallacies as the technical errors of great painters, the harmonic or orchestral wonders of poor music, the faulty construction of a great play; fallacies which may sometimes have originated from some real character of the æsthetic fact, but which are mere contradictions in terms. And the literary critic will speak of the fine frenzy and the quiet eye, meaning by the one, the abstract inspiration, and by the other the abstract production, and so miss the true æsthetic moment which is neither the one nor the other, but the synthesis of the two. Or he will oppose romanticism to classicism, in a similar sense, without realizing that all art is at the same time romantic and classic, truly inspired, and because truly inspired, able to express itself.
Mere variations of the naturalistic or psychological conception of technique, as an actual moment of the æsthetic creation, are a series of theories which Croce has extensively criticised, and of which we can give but a cursory account.
The theories of the particular arts and of their limits originate from the manuals of practical precepts useful to architects, sculptors, painters or musicians, and are founded on the assumed possibility of finding a field of the æsthetic activity corresponding to the physical means employed by each category of artists. But we have already seen that in the æsthetic fact there is no distinction between means and end: we can speak of the various arts in a purely empirical sense, as an external classification of the objects of art, but not as classes of æsthetic activity.